


Taming Dionysus

by tagliatellegrande



Category: A Series of Unfortunate Events (TV), A Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket
Genre: Canon as possible but that's an ask!, Domestic Fluff, F/F, Mutual Pining, Slow Burn, musings on the main theme of Anna Karenina and different interpretations of said theme, tfw u got great taste in women but ur in a secret society that dictates ur whole life
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-27
Updated: 2018-08-26
Packaged: 2019-05-14 14:09:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 10,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14771144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tagliatellegrande/pseuds/tagliatellegrande
Summary: The schism, what little was understood of it, was never simply black or white. And nor were the unfortunate people caught within it, with strange tattoos on their ankles and a penchant for the theatre.Beatrice always respected Esmé. She wanted to see the best in her, too.Interconnected Esbea drabbles, pre-ASOUE, all VFDrama.





	1. [S]he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.

It is spring in the city. The towering boxes of high, grey buildings are lit more kindly in these warmer months, when the sun creeps to meet the day and stays awhile. Hidden from the busy roads and the taxis and hurry of the city, there is a park where an eye-catching young woman lies on the grass. Although the weather is growing hotter, sticky and honey-glossed in its humidity, her dress is black and unforgiving. The fabric is clasped at the shoulder by a slightly odd brooch; a brooch that if you saw, for example, while hiding beneath the table of a very expensive penthouse kitchen, might appear to look back at you. But the girl in the park is fortunately not looking back and the vision of her is interrupted only by the dark sprawls of tree branches. She is posed near the bank of the lake and using the tips of her fingers to skim the pages of a paper pamphlet, which she has lain on the larger pages of a magazine. 

“That doesn’t look like Anna Karenina.” 

It is rude to leer at other people’s reading materials, of course. But exceptions can be made under certain circumstances, Beatrice knows, so she doesn’t feel rude to stand half bent over Esmé. When you would very much like an acquaintance to honour a literary recommendation, it can be hurtful if they have chosen to ignore it, and particularly if their ignorance causes your own experience of the text to be made poorer. Although Beatrice had barely begun the novel, she had already spent a few idle minutes here and there wondering Esmé’s thoughts on the marriage and affair of Countess Karenina, anticipating the thoughts of another as she scribbled her own notes in the margins. She has debates in her head, as if she is studying for the two of them. 

“Waste my summer reading that old thing? I think not,” Esmé says, taking a pair of cat-eyed sunglasses from their perch on her head. Trapping her reading beneath an elbow, she smiles lazily. “I hope you didn’t go to the trouble of buying me another copy.”

“I did.”

From her shoulder-bag, Beatrice uncovers a fresh and unburnt hardback that is rather similar to the one she purchased a fortnight ago. She sits in the grass, apparently unworried at the thought of grass stains on her beige slacks and rests her weight on her hands. “What have you got to do this summer that’s so pressing that you can’t manage a few pages a day?”

“Everything! Absolutely everything!” The book looks far too thick, for starters. It also looks old. That it is bound with a sickly looking shade of blue cloth does not help matters, for the stupid thing is even too ugly to just have on a shelf. “Why do you care if I read it? I never expected an invitation to book-club, darling.”

When Beatrice shrugs, the dark tousles of her hair shrug too. “I thought it might interest you,” she says, settling her dark, placid eyes on the lake. She briefly considers evaluating Esmé’s capability to dissect the text, the energy and spirit and perhaps even empathy which she could most likely bring to a discussion of lovelorn, hapless socialites. Instead, she unbuttons another button of her shirt, just a little too heavy for the weather, and glances back to her companion. “What are you reading then?”

“Nothing that would interest you.” But Esmé can see Beatrice is in the mood to be snooping and is already refocusing her interest. She is smiling that persuasive, big grin of hers as her hands find the corners of Vogue. Originally named Vogue Fashion Discourse, the magazine has been criticised under new management; the general consensus is that the quality of its articles are suffering greatly. However, some things do not change, and it is possible that Beatrice was born with thieving hands as well as the uncanny ability to whistle with crackers in one’s mouth. 

“I’m interested in whatever is so important that you can’t read a real book for once in your life.”

“You people are infuriating!” Esmé seethes, making sure to snatch the magazine in her hand and roll it with great speed into a baton with which Beatrice is promptly swatted. “It feels real, doesn’t it?”

“Just let me-”

“Whatever it is, it is not Anya Karenina!”

Beatrice is too busy pulling at the furled papers to bother correcting her. It is only by pinching Esmé’s hand that she is able to retrieve her reading, and as the magazine unfurls, from its centre falls the smaller, printed pamphlet. This turns out to be more interesting than Vogue’s editorial on why black and white photography is out but the primary colours are in (with the reverse true for a person’s own fashion palette). 

“You won’t read Anna Karenina this summer but you are looking to study at university?” 

“If you must know.”

There was not a lot of difference between them that day, sat side by side at the lake. Two dark haired girls, almost women but not quite, with their heads bent over things to be read. 

“Study what?” 

“The theatre.”

“Study it?”

“Live it.”

Beatrice smooths the pamphlet out and hands it back with an air of discomfort. “That’s grand,” she concedes, dipping her eyes as she smiles. 

“Beatrice, your definition of grand is so unflattering and so boring and so completely abysmal that I would rather you didn’t think anything I did was grand. Perhaps it isn’t writing type for some wonderful newspaper, or shadowing the section editor of a more successful and even more boring newspaper, or even training and reforming dangerous animals-”

“You mean to say that being grand is out,” Beatrice summarises. Vogue had replaced a column of trustworthy establishments and vague estimations of where to find them with a column of In and Out about ten years ago, long before Esmé had begun reading such things and absorbing the vocabulary. And society at large, it seemed, was becoming more interested in In than ever before. “I misspoke. Besides, it’s exciting!”

“Is it now?”

“Oh yes.” Beatrice smiles in that charming way of her that is more of a grin. “Theatres are exciting. Not just for acting in, but in the academic sense, too. Radical places even.”

Esmé is cautiously pleased. “Yes, radical,” she says, sitting a little straighter. Her eyes light with unrestrained ambition that Beatrice believes could be better directed, and so well directed, if the right mentor could find the way. “Radical and grotesque and spectacular and glamorous.” She oozes that word as if it being squeezed from every pore beneath her very in dress. 

“Yes, yes,” Beatrice agrees, wanting badly to match her and pin the moment down, though she is not quite sure where Esmé’s mind has found the word grotesque or what sense she is using it in. No time to ask. “It’s so noble,” she gleams, “to find new ways to communicate with the every-man. A whole audience.”

Looking at Esmé, Beatrice envisions her a few years from now, university educated and matured. A little less concerned with fashion, perhaps, a lot more concerned with the values of the modern stage. Perhaps Esmé’s melodramatic acting inclinations would be frowned upon professionally if not counterbalanced with the method or highbrow realism, but yes, Beatrice can see her in the theatre. The most noble siren of the century, imploring the masses to take note of the virtues of a valiantly Faustian dramaturge whose work is both tender and miserable and most importantly: principled. Beatrice wants her there. 

She has said the wrong thing. If she had had Esmé’s attention, she has lost it. 

“You know I couldn’t care less for Dosto-what-sky or any of your nobility, if you insist on calling it that, nor your noble ideas or friends.” 

This list does not quite seem to include Beatrice, but Anna Karenina has been finally damned. Abandoning her pamphlet, Esmé stretches over Beatrice and clasps the heavy volume of Tolstoy. She heaves it over and stands abruptly to begin a curt march towards the lake. 

“Esmé, don’t you dare-” Scrambling to catch up, Beatrice lunges from the grass. Just as she wraps her arms tightly around Esmé’s waist, Esmé has wrenched back her arm. It is too late for Beatrice to stop Anna Karenina from being cruelly flung into the water. It hits with a splash, disturbing a duck or two, and becomes swollen out and sodden with water; the hardcover seems to lay out its hands helplessly as it floats along the water top. This is the second copy of Anna Karenina Esmé has destroyed in the past month. 

Beatrice is holding her. Esmé smiles horribly over her shoulder. 

“You needn’t buy me another, Bea.”


	2. You are one of the lights, the light of all lights.

There are many ways to find out the information that one wants. Of course, a studious person is likely to immediately research written sources to find whatever they are looking for. Perhaps, for example, the office address of the head-editor of a corrupt and libellous newspaper, or the whereabouts of a lost loved one. But there are types of people in this world, for better or for worse, who differ greatly from the studious kind. Such a person may learn what they would like to know through varying means. Say, for instance, that a girl of fifteen residing in a sprawling, metropolitan city became intrigued by the membership of an organisation that she had never volunteered to join. Having heard far too many stories about her peers, a certain type of girl might begin eavesdropping in the right places, connecting certain names to certain initials and certain initials to certain stories until a passably coherent, if faceless picture, formed before her. Even in the biggest of places, you will be surprised how easy it is to find a common link between yourself and a person imitating a stranger.

The method of the unscholarly investigator is what has led Esmé to a little establishment that purportedly serves the best root-beer floats in the city. She has never been here before and she enters with a strangely steely confidence not befitting the average young customer; the ring of a bell signals her entrance and for a moment she stands in the door way like the sheriff of a small and easily influenced village. Interrupting the centre of the room is a long bar from which to serve customers which is stocked tightly with large jars of assorted syrups and sugars, and in the corner, there is a shelf of battered looking novels and pamphlets. The tables are small and circular; Esmé is aware of how alone she will look. Nevertheless, she orders a float of ginger beer and vanilla, having overheard in the smoking longue of a fashionable hotel lobby, a place where she ought not to have been no matter her interest in the visiting popular crooner, that ginger beer is both exotic and delightful. She takes a drink and a seat and begins to survey the clientele of this homely place.

Esmé does not know who she is looking for. She had not been able to find a single photograph, much less a clear one. Yet, when looking at the clientele of this place, where parents spoil their children and teenagers flirt over shared sundaes, it is almost too obvious as to who she is looking for.

It is a table for two, but the occupants are not sharing one float but drink one each. It is the table nearest to the corner, with the boy wedged in a chair right against the wall and the girl sat beside the shelf of books. Although Esmé cannot see the skin of their ankles, such details are unimportant. One does not really need the sight of a tattoo to confirm a person’s association with VFD. It is all etched into the face, Esmé has come to realise, for VFD may force a tattoo but only incidentally encourages a hardiness to the face that is unbecoming and slightly startling in young people.

This is most evident on the features of the boy. Though he appears smiling and comfortable, there is a slack quality to the corners of his mouth that evoke an emotion between disappointment and regret. His posture seems evaluating and thus ill at ease, with his ankle resting on one knee and the thumb of one hand idly brushing over the knot of his fingers. Every so often, he pokes the straw deeply into his drink and pushes through the foam and half-melted ice cream. Then he rests back again, temporarily satisfied with his standings.

Esmé is not taken by his ungainliness, nor the serious way in which he listens and speaks to the girl. She is also unimpressed that it is only the girl who has seemed to notice the way in which she is staring. It is a completely unapologetic look, so lacking in subtlety that the girl across the room has come to the conclusion that they are being watched, and furthermore that they are meant to know they are being watched.

You may know that the feeling of being watched is an uncomfortable one. Such a situation brings to mind the idiom that ignorance is bliss, for if you are unaware that someone is watching your every move, you can fearlessly continue as you were, no matter what it is that you happened to be doing. But if you do suspect that someone is watching you, there are immediate questions that you may want to answer. Why am I being watched? Who is the person watching me? Is this surveillance connected with the morally ambiguous act I committed in good faith under the supervision of an authorised mentor a year or two ago, or perhaps to the mistake I made whilst climbing to the heights of a dangerous and snow ridden mountain?

But Beatrice is not afraid. She smiles at the girl, brushing an unruly curl of her hair behind her ear as she does as if to say: come over. I’m listening.

The cue is not responded to obediently. Esmé would like to finish her drink, so she does. It is only after she has sipped her way to the glassy bottom of her float that she stands and approaches the shelf of books, free to browse and take. She crouches to investigate the selection and chooses a copy of Dracula. She has no genuine interest in reading the novel, having already seen and enjoyed the motion picture, but she knows how to signal and knows she best appear interested, if she would like any answers. 

“I didn’t realise this was a sad occasion,” says the girl on the chair, sitting at an angle to speak to the other. The boy across the table looks perturbed. He dips his eyes to take a drink. But Beatrice is watching the girl whose age, though likely similar to her own, is hard to decipher. She looks tall, Beatrice thinks, even when she is crouching, and she had watched her rifle through the books very nimbly with her fingers. This either suggests a lack of curiosity or a single-minded aim. Beatrice does not have enough evidence to draw conclusions from the browsing habits of the girl, but she thinks that the type of person who appears like fate across the room and stares at she and her friend as if drawn to a magnificent artwork cannot be lacking in purpose.

‘I didn’t realise this was a sad occasion,’ is a strange way to start a conversation, of course. Beatrice might have preferred to ask, ‘What are you reading?’ Or, ‘Do you not like root beer floats? They’re a speciality here.’ Maybe she would have even liked to have said something along the tricky path of ‘It’s not often that pretty girls stare at me from across the room.’ All of these choices would have been more conventional conversational starters than the one she used.

A sad occasion is a term used to define a number of upsetting events or instances. A housefire might be described as a sad occasion, if it is your house that has been torched to the ground, or even if is not your own home, though you considered the house to be very beautiful. A funeral may also be considered a sad occasion, and particularly if you were close to the deceased, a noun which does not immediately reveal whether its usage is singular or plural.  

However, there are limits to the phrase ‘a sad occasion.’ Sad is a simple adjective that most people learn to use at a very young age. For this reason, it is accurate but lacking in precision. Sadness, and therefore the phrase a sad occasion, cannot capture the multiplicity of some depths of sadness we may feel as we age. Sad does not describe the active state of suffering, for example, nor the endurance of fear, nor the nausea of uncertainty, nor the growth of ennui or the stain of disillusionment.

Esmé finds the phrase ‘I didn’t realise this was a sad occasion’ very lacking, although occasionally it is fittingly accurate.

“Not at all,” Esmé says. She notices in the corner of her eye that the boy glances up to the girl from his drink. “I find the world is quiet here.”

The girl on the chair smiles. The boy looks to the girl with book. Suddenly they are all tied up together and there is a feeling of something burgeoning around them, like the swell of foam trapped shaken in a bottle.

“As do we,” says Beatrice, smiling very widely at the girl. She does not have that VFD worn look. In fact, there is even something a little haphazard about her. The way she lolls her head as she talks and the way her curls bounce with her. She is leaning right back into her chair, too, which in some circumstances might be considered improper or lazy. And she appears genuinely thrilled that the code has been answered, as if this is not a sad occasion. “Dracula?” she asks, standing from her chair to crouch beside the other girl. The text is opened at a seemingly random page, with a pen and ink illustration of the count, as already portrayed on screen, stood with his cape flared, his look furious, his intentions devious.

“You’re right.” But Esmé is finished with the book and placing it back on the shelf. She slots it back into place with a delicate precision, her fingers taking a moment to slide down the spine of the novel even though she does not want to read it.

“You don’t want to take it with you? Perhaps you’ve read it already.”

The boy is moving his straw again. “An adventure story,” he says, in a tone that suggests he disapproves. “A strange, silly thing about diablery.”

“I think you’ll find, library boy, that it’s a novel about vampires,” Esmé replies haughtily. She does not like the way the slack mouthed boy smiles closed-mouthed as he returns to his drink. But she does look to the girl, who does not look in any way superior, and fixes her eyes on her. “I shan’t waste time reading about imagined unknowns and horrors when there are plenty of real unknowns and horrors all around us that aren’t being properly explored.”

Somehow, Esmé speaking freely and earnestly is less clear than secret coding. Beatrice’s eyes are uncertain but focused with intent.

“Are you in danger?” she asks quietly. She knows she should not ask such things so blatantly, but the question is pressing enough that a code won’t do. Nevertheless, the girl is only frustrated by the meaningless helpfulness of the inquiry and already shaking her head.

“You’re asking the wrong question!” Esmé says, looking to the other as if she is sharing a well-kept and enlightening secret. She thinks this is the girl she has heard so much about. Trained in rhetoric, authoritative with animals, fearless and brave and bright and wonderful. “What you should be asking, and what I am asking all the time, is why we are or have been in danger in the first place, regardless of the relative volume of the world in which we are living.”

Beatrice thinks that the girl, who will later be known as E, and even later be known as Esmé, and in some occasional distressing and wonderful moments will be known as Mimì, in the style of an opera that never fails to make Beatrice feel that there are too many sad occasions in this life, has the shiniest eyes she has ever seen.

“Perhaps you are asking the wrong questions,” Beatrice counters, adjusting herself to the abrupt nature of the conversation. “Can you be sure that we were ever in danger in the first place?”

“Can’t you?” Esmé’s eyes are fixed so closely on Beatrice that she does not want to say that she isn’t sure, even though she would like to answer on the strength of her gut instincts.

“Can you be sure that vampires aren’t real?” Her tone is playful. She catches the top of the book in the shelf and leans it back, taking hold of it and offering it to Esmé. Answering a question with another question is not really an answer at all. This is one of the first things one learns when studying rhetoric. “I’m B,” she says as means of introduction.

“Bea,” Esmé murmurs, having not realised that Beatrice had only meant to use her initial. She takes Dracula, though she does not expect it to tell her anything about whether vampires are in fact real or not. She has a suspicion that she knows the answer anyway. “My mentor spoke about you for such long periods that at times I thought it’d never end.”  

Most legends are wholly untrue. Some, however, are only half untrue. 


	3. To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.

Beatrice should have known it was too generous of her to allow Esmé to pick where they ate for lunch. She’d kill for a pastrami sandwich or a Reuben at this time of the day, having spent the morning learning and reciting lines and thus running a little late, too caught up in the delivery of a troublesome little remark nearing the end of Act One. She knows, as she rounds another block at speed, that she will not hear the end of it for years, having made Esmé wait. Now is not the time to rush herself into somewhere lavish, where time doesn’t exist for people who hardly work.

It is unfortunate that she let Esmé choose where to eat lunch.

She smooths her skirt as she enters the building. It is ridiculous to make an effort when meeting Esmé, for no matter what she is wearing, whether it be rather flattering or worthy of ridicule, she will be dressed in a way that is more charismatic. This does not stop Beatrice from wanting to out-stage her from time to time (that is, at least, how she formulates the desire in her head). So she raises her chin defiantly and takes care to stand a little straighter, having no idea if her clothes are in but certain that they flatter her. She does not need to be told.

It is not as busy as she may have expected at lunch time. As such, the sight of Esmé draped at a bar stool, elbows resting on a hideously expensive marble counter appears to her directly. Beatrice wonders whether she chose her blouse, that lounges over her as she lounges over the counter, to match with the white marble. The tweed trousers are surprising but handsome.

“So you have made it! I was starting to think you had stood me up, Beatrice – and we both know that wouldn’t end well. Thank you, bar-tender, but it looks like I can find a real seat now.”

Esmé stands with her drink, a lowball glass with a swivel of orange peel coiled through the liquid, and looks inquiringly to Beatrice.

“What did you want to drink, darling?”

“I didn’t know it was cocktail hour.” Nevertheless, she comes closer and lays her palms flat on the counter, studying the selection of liquors available.

“Business lunch, Bea,” Esmé says, twisting to briefly look over a menu. “Bar-man! She’ll have the marmalade Manhattan. If you could bring it to-” and then she is forward facing once more, eyes investigating the entirety of the restaurant. Eventually, she points. “-that table.”

“I could order for myself. And thank you,” she says to the bar-tender, watching as Esmé strides towards the coveted table at the window. Admittedly, it is the best seat in the restaurant, marble bar aside. She follows and half hates herself for it, plonking herself into the seat left for her, which is rounded and plush and warmly comfortable. “What exactly makes this a business lunch?”

Esmé leans forward to set her glass on the table. Her eyes are under Beatrice.

“Anybody who’s anybody knows to mix their business with their pleasure.” She has found service is usually better if one says very loudly and repeatedly that they have come for business purposes and furthermore, discovered that if one pretends one is at a business lunch, one may end up at a business lunch. It is like live theatre.

“Am I the business or the pleasure then?” Beatrice asks, thanking the bartender briefly for her drink when he brings it and wishing she could chide Esmé’s taste – she cannot.

“Good, isn’t it?” Esmé remarks on the Manhattan, extending her hand to taste it and nodding afterwards. “And as for your previous question, that wholly depends on how tiresome you plan to be today.”

“I’m only tiresome because you’re incorrigible.”

“Am not.” She grins. Beatrice had opened her mouth too quickly to reply in kind. “If you must know, this is wholly a trip for pleasure. As you can imagine, I have no business with you.”

“That’s strange, because I have business with you.” Beatrice watches Esmé unfold a menu and sit back in her chair.

“Really?”

“Can’t you guess?”

“Not at all, I’m awfully busy these days.”

“Too busy for the theatre group.”

“I have found a new theatre group.”

“A new acting teacher, perhaps?”

“You may be right.”

It is freeing. He is not a good actor, nor is he particularly well groomed, but Esmé feels electric in the hideousness of all that chaotic feeling. Because he is furious, she feels able to be furious, and because he cackles and schemes and shines with greed, she takes pleasure in the naming of her own desires. They like the stories in the financial district, of dipping her hands into wallets after rounds of free drinks, or the way she performs with a stylish business card with fake credentials, and nobody doubts her ability to observe and analyse; she is not made to feel inferior to the Snicket at The Financial Times, whose writing she finds uninspired, idealistic, and all together rather limp.

Spreading a menu out on the table and looking hard at it, Beatrice bites the inside of her lip. “He’s an awful actor and a brute of a man.” She has heard as such from various sources and seen it with her own eyes. “I have no doubts that if you really need a new acting teacher, you could find someone more suitable within two minutes.”

“I am beginning to think that I like my acting teachers as I like my work.” Esmé’s eyes dart upwards briefly from the menu. “Hands on.”

It is infuriating that Beatrice is still looking over the restaurant’s selection of soups. She has picked the menu up as the table now seems too far away, too close to Esmé, and sits with an angle that sidles to the side, her feet pointed elsewhere like exit signs. They are quiet for too long a while before Beatrice says:

“I think I’ll have the squash soup.”

Esmé purses her lips for a moment. She has been looking out the window, watching people pass by rather than evaluating that outfit Beatrice has on, or her sullen face, or the way her brows furrow crossly. They are in an area where she can admire women’s fur coats through the window, or the silken blue of a paisley tie, or the shine of leather shoes or a thick strapped watch, or the vivid, bloody red on the bottom of a heel. These are all more interesting than the baby pink of Beatrice’s skirt, the sharp black of her blouse (makes her look like morbid, severe) with the shoes that don’t match; her jaw is too strong against the high frills of the blouse, strange and androgynous. She would like to touch the fabric of the jaw and test the flesh beneath her fingers. More quietly in her mind, she thinks she would like to kiss her sneeringly, hold her face too close and too firm with her thumbs too hard against her. Tell her that she knows it all.  

There is another thought so quiet that she pretends not to hear it.

“I decided on oysters five minutes ago.” She can feel the look. “They’re in.”

“For gentiles, maybe.”

“Did you never read The Importance of Being Genteel?” Esmé mutters to herself. Having rolled her eyes, she does not notice that Beatrice is holding back a disapproving smile clenched around her jaw. 

Beatrice does not think she needs to say that she misses Esmé at the theatre. Her protegee, she used to goad her, guiding her through the old gestures of a monologue, hand on her wrist, raising her arm like a marionette. It was strange when Esmé went to university and became increasingly enthused by the stock market (“both fascinating and terrifying, Bea, so much so that I feel shivers just walking through the financial district!”) It was not so strange when, with increasingly bold confidence, she began rejecting the marionette routine, though perhaps it was alarming when she would at times grasp Beatrice for herself, pressing her hands to her waist to correct her posture, she said, or directing her chin at a new angle for a certain, weary scene, repeated for the fourth or fifth time that morning in the heat of an old and small community theatre. Grab her script sometimes, stand across from her, and insist that she look at her as they played it out once more. The serpentine way she moved her head after the boys left for lunch and that awful, intelligent smile on her face when Beatrice appeared flustered when they returned.

“You’re not funny. I won’t laugh at you,” Beatrice says, shaking her head and lifting herself in her seat, feet pressed together primly. She pauses, running a hand through one side of her hair. “And I don’t know why you’d waste your talent on such a heinous theatre troupe.”

“It hardly makes a difference. I was only wasting my talent on a ruthlessly didactic theatre troupe before.”

“Did we not have fun?”

“Nowhere near enough.”

Beatrice cannot reply as a waiter sets a bowl of soup before her, and after that a large, rounded silver plate of oysters across the table. They shine with the glimmer of an ocean tide, decorated with thin wedges of lemon and sprigs of parsley across the plate. Esmé looks to Beatrice as she takes one and swallows, tipping the shell at her lips and inclining back her head. As her throat falls back to posture, her tongue swipes her upper lip as she places the emptied shell into a smaller bowl. Instead of reaching for a handkerchief, she wipes a half-moon across her mouth with her tongue.  

“Is there nowhere else you can find your amusements, Esmé?” Beatrice realises her voice is unreasonably, suddenly brusque. It is harder to deal with Esmé in purely logical ways when she is there in the flesh, tactile and full in her presence, overbearingly stimulating in a variety of ways. There are scrapes of orange to her perfume that creep beneath the tangle of thorned floral notes. There is the way she gazes and glances, articulating disdain that would only be weakened by words, and how is constantly gesturing minutely with every, whole inch of herself. The sighs and coos of her speech are surely only there to make the lash of her aggravation more wounding.

“Absolutely.” And she laughs. But she is not looking at Beatrice anymore. Instead, she plays the rim of her lowball glass with her thumb until she takes another drink. “I know it is hard for you to understand doing something purely for one’s own pleasure and not for the so called greater good, but if I cannot find a satisfying purpose with one theatre troupe, I think it is my responsibility to create the opportunity in another.”

It is only when Beatrice reaches across the table to still Esmé’s hand that she looks to her again. Her lips purse, widen into a smile, and then she draws back her fingers atop the glass. Beatrice’s thumb brushes against the top of her hand and Esmé is disappointed that she feels her touch in the pulse of her throat. She is disappointed that when she catches irresistibly onto that stern gaze, she is almost compelled to throw over Olaf’s acting troupe, only to spend another few hours a week as Beatrice’s understudy.

“I don’t want to do things purely for my own pleasure.” Beatrice feels too far away. She wants those words at Esmé’s ear, right against her, as she did on occasion, by accident, if she recalls correctly, as she fed her lines. Instead she leans closer to the table, mindful of her blouse and the bowl of soup, and continues the slow stroke of Esmé’s hand. She tells herself that such a gesture is within widely accepted boundaries. “And nor do you.”

“I really, absolutely do.”

“Not at all.” Beatrice gently pushes Esmé’s hand across and over the glass and leaves it there, withdrawing her own to safety afterwards. She hides her hands between her legs as if afraid to be caught with soot on her fingers. “If you ever want to please me, come back to us. Our theatre.”

Esmé has folded her hand on the table. Her face has dimmed considerably. Her eyelashes lower and taking the sight of the oysters a second time, she is dismayed by the wet crease of the innards, the white slab of flesh and the ugly sheen they possess. Perhaps there is a reason they are not kosher.  

“And is there anything in that arrangement for me?” she asks, her lips pulling tight her jaw. She thinks that Beatrice would make an atrocious business woman.

Beatrice’s smile seems to express misfortune. She is looking out the window and smoothing the tablecloth with her thumb.

“I can’t say.”


	4. [...] I am afraid to write the stronger word

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Anyone want a self-loathing domestic portrait? Nice

“I think you will find that it is all my inheritance and I won’t be wasting it on, what exactly? An aesthetically dull library that creates nothing and produces nothing and only stores what successful people have already capitalised on? Or, better yet! Perhaps another meeting place that will be destroyed within the month and found out even quicker, where people such as yourselves hold disorganised little meetings such as this like – like beggars?”

That was the last speech E. gave at a VFD meeting, and the last one she attended unarmed and rather innocently. She had been the only one stood in the room, with her fingers perched on the wood of the table and her arms extended, the line of her shoulders extended by the caped shoulders of her blouse and her arms entangled with rich plumes of fabric. Her comments do not go without debate or contemptuous disregard, but there is a way she momentarily commands this room of mopey-eyed adolescents with the fire of her indignance.

Why should she give up her inheritance? It’s hers.

B. does not follow when E. leaves conclusively, slamming the huge, heavy door as though it is a practised art to her. But as the others trickle out, she slips forward and thinks of where she might find her, giving excuses as to why she cannot currently come to the lounge. Instead, she works her way through numerous rooms, dormitories, and hiding spots before she finds E. in the echoing halls of the portrait gallery, which is an odd, eerie place. There are half-destroyed paintings, plaques without images, photographs that do not seem to contain any people, photographs of costumed actors and costumed civilians and coded, abstract artworks which B. does not really care for and cannot read.

It is a historical monument that will be lost in another great fire.

“A strange time to study the gallery, isn’t it?” B. asks. She smiles apologetically as E. turns her head too quickly.  “I didn’t mean to-”

“I’m not studying it, I’m simply looking at it.” E. has turned her face back to a gloomy canvas. She has told B. before that it is in fact a portrait, through it does not look like a portrait. It seems a regimented wash of dark hued and foreboding colours, with a vivid, blue shriek of scribble scored thickly at the centre and upper left of the canvas. B. has not been taught how to read these things. “A person can just look at things, things that are as they seem, and enjoy looking at them until they no longer want to look at them.”

“You like the colours then?”

“I would rather that the blue was a less offensive shade or colour completely."

B. laughs. She has never heard blue termed as offensive. She is not sure she could ever feel so strongly as to term any colour offensive. She stands beside E. to take in the canvas, folding her arms seriously and tilting her head just so, playing the critic.

“I see what you mean. Maybe the blue is horrendous after all,” she says, jutting her jaw comically for a moment and then taking a step back, holding her fingers out as a camera and evaluating the piece again. “Yes, yes… The blue is…Shocking! But not revolutionary. Chaos in the order – tragedy.”

E. purses her lips for a moment to withhold the twitch of a smile. “If you must know,” she begins slyly, turning to look at B., who lowers her hand-made camera, “blue, in this painting, at least, is a mark of the fire-fighter.”

“I’ll have to review my earlier criticism.” B. looks past E. to the painting. It seems more foreboding than ever. She puts her hands in her pockets, leaning back on her heels idly, before rocking back into place and looking at E. She is interrupted before she can even start.

“Don’t lecture me.”

“You wouldn’t listen.”

“How right you are.”

Silence.

E. moves her attention from the strange portrait and wanders through the room as one can only wander in a gallery, with the gentle, weaving purpose of the undecided visitor. Her eyes are caught by another strange painting, another that renders B. illiterate, and she places herself before it.

B. places herself beside E. She would like E. to read it to her but does not feel like asking. Instead she folds her arms again, her hip cocked to one side, and pretends she can read it herself.

“May I ask you something?”

“If you insist on it.”

“You’re right,” B. begins in her most diplomatic style, “that your inheritance is yours. And for the sake of this conversation only, I’ll concede that perhaps libraries are useless, and maybe funds should not go on temporary meeting places. Maybe money shouldn’t be spent on things like galleries, or theatres,” she stresses, widening her eyes as she speaks.

“Will you be finding a point any time soon, Bea, or just confessing that you are more sympathetic to my thoughts that you can say before your friends?”

E. does not care about embarrassing her in front of her friends. She is unapologetically a nuisance. But when she says it like that, drawing it through her teeth that foreground an odd smile, B. feels as though she is somehow wrong, though she will never believe that libraries, galleries, theatres, or even meeting places, are a waste of money.

“Hear me out,” she urges, turning herself from the art hung wall. “Even if these things are all unimportant, why would you, a singular person, ever need that amount of money all to yourself? We’re fortunate enough,” she says, without a hint of irony, “that we have this money, enough for ourselves, and enough to spare.”

“You are completely missing the point,” E. says, the smile wiped off and her look patronising. “As you said yourself, it’s my inheritance and I’ll do what I damn well want with it. Have you your pocket dictionary to hand? Inheritance is a word for when your parents are dead.”

“I know what inheritance means.” B. does not drop her gaze. She knows the word inheritance very well indeed. “Money is not something to be clung to. It can make things tangible.” She cannot believe she is discussing the tangible with E., who now, as always, is fully immersed in it. The way she locates herself in the gallery, with the subtle smell of drying oils, the light and the dark of the photographs, the echoed footsteps of the visitor and even how she stands, arms crossed and her fingers digging into the soft creases of her blouse.

“Money is not tangible in itself,” E. says, “and it is the last thing my parents gave to me.”

When a person studies the art of rhetoric, they will learn many masterful ways in which to argue their point. Rhetoric is a strange, duplicitous art, where the unfeeling tactic of logic becomes full with the force of feeling, which may be founded upon untruths or misdemeanours. If B. had approached this conversation with the force of her rhetoric, perhaps she may have wanted to feel as though she had won.

Instead, she holds E.’s shoulders in her hands and smooths her thumbs across them. And then she pulls her closer insistently, shushing the small complaints, and hugs her warmly, in companionship rather than in grief or pity.

There is no victory here. But she knows, somehow, that despite whatever holds them, she and E. have chosen their lives and chosen differently. 

* * *

 

Beatrice has not seen Esmé for weeks. Not since the argument at her apartment where a handful of her sonnets went missing in obviously unsuspicious circumstances. Not since she mentioned B.

Doubt is an important part of life, Beatrice thinks, lying idly in bed late in the morning, half-watching the sun skimming the shutters at her window. We ought to be proud and confident of the choices we make, surely, but perhaps it is also healthy to doubt them. She would like to believe that there are soothing qualities to be found when the mind escapes us and mines itself.

She will not be made to feel guilty for just imagining it. Because it isn’t the choice she has made, nor is it, she supposes, the one she wants; thinking it is merely indulging the temptation to do away with it.

That is such an Esmé line of reasoning.

Beatrice flops onto her stomach and groans into a pillow, contemplating how rapidly her life has been flitting from circumstance to circumstance. There are many things at work here that she cannot control, she forgives herself, and she would like to count thought of Esmé as one of the very minor things of which she cannot control.

What is more embarrassing is the great urge to explain herself, although she has not articulated anything, nor is there anyone in her company to overhear her.

“Good morning, darling.”

Beatrice feels her before she really hears her. Bleary eyed and bed-headed, she awakes slowly and familiarly to her wife beside her.

(this is stupid so stupid so fanciful like a poorly written novel with a ridiculous front cover something I would never read just stupid eroticism as if Esmé would ever marry anyway she’d just feel trapped with me me and the rest like we’d argue every day every night with passion how healthy Beatrice this is exactly why you shouldn’t waste your time on your own thinkings of people how does that critic quote about Nabokov go?)

“Baby, good morning.” It is easy. Beatrice kisses her and melts into smiling when Esmé refuses to relent, pulling her closer without touching her, drawing her in with her lips and her jaw and the mingled smell of warmth and perfume and coffee somewhere in the house, already brewing. “Sleep well?” She brushes Esmé’s arm with her hand and looks outward briefly, twisting her head to the door. “And the baby’s still asleep?”

(that’s unrealistic are babies ever in fashion they’re never in fashion because they’re permanent I couldn’t raise a baby as an accessory it’s like child abuse but oh imagine Esmé with a baby really with one as if she liked it shy with it or on her hip maybe she would love to buy baby clothes I wish I could)

“Very much asleep,” Esmé says, brushing Beatrice’s cheek with her thumb. She is without makeup and she yawns, stretching her back before settling back in bed, bringing Beatrice with her. Without a thought about it, Beatrice nestles her head at the crook of her shoulder and laughs lightly as their legs tangle. She feels safe and warm and something tells her that neither of them have tattoos.  

“Are you busy today?”

“I wanted us, the three of us, to visit that new exhibition I mentioned. The messy Austrian nudes and sketches that are on loan.” Esmé smiles slowly. “Something, dare I say, even you can enjoy.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in taking children to art galleries?”

“I changed my mind. A baby isn’t a brat when she’s your own brat.” Esmé kisses the top of her forehead. “The real brat here is usually you, darling. You get terribly irritable in art galleries.”

“You never want to explain anything to me.”

Esmé snorts. It is unpretty, and Beatrice basks in it. She is fascinated by the woman in bed without her makeup, without pretense, who appears resplendent and at ease. “Even a married woman has to have some secrets.”

(she isn't real it just wouldn’t be like this she wouldn’t be like this she has never been like this she is never at peace she fights fates she fights me you can't find the goodness forever)

“We can’t stay in bed forever.”

“Sometimes I think we come close.” The smile is devilish and Beatrice feels the look. More than that, she greets it.

“Don’t tempt me.”

“Was I?”

Beatrice kisses her once, firmly, before sitting up in bed. Esmé is reclined and watching her, fiddling with a pinch of fabric at her neck-line. Evidently, she doesn't believe this to be over. Her eyes do not move from Beatrice and Beatrice, more so than being watched, feels felt. 

“Don’t give me that look,” Beatrice laughs, shaking her head. Before she can properly turn herself away, she is summoned.

“One more kiss.”

“You’re never satisfied with one.”

“I’ll be good this morning,” Esmé promises, her nails light on the back of Beatrice's hand. “One more kiss before breakfast, darling.”

And of course, it can’t be small. Esmé holds both her cheeks and draws her near and kisses her imploringly, lingering at the pauses where perhaps they ought to stop. Beatrice is not the type to pull away and does not object when she feels their chests meet, her arm curled somewhere near Esmé’s head and her knee pressed between two coiling thighs. She does not object when Esmé’s nose pushes slightly, dipping intriguingly, nor when she returns with a nip at her bottom lip that merely precedes the slight gap of her lips, nor the way her fingers feel in the curls of her hair, how her thumb brushes past her ear and her fingers tighten as her own knee is forced a little more firmly into place.

There is an amused hum that ripples into just the beginning of a laugh. “Darling, I do love when you can’t say no.”

The words prick the skin of her arms, the lining of her stomach, her cheeks. She kisses Esmé harder and likes the way her laugh catches in her throat, she likes the way her back strains against the bed, she likes the way her thigh feels beneath her hand and the way Esmé nips her earlobe.

She likes the high, hurried way she says: “Beatrice, darling,” that much quoted endearment is heavy and rich with the clotted rain of humid weather, “how I love you.”

Beatrice makes breakfast alone, ashamedly, in her apartment. She pretends she never thought it. There were only ever two choices, two real choices, and she chose correctly. 


	5. "...Wild, wicked slip of a girl. She burned too brightly-"

The entitlements of the audience attending the theatre has changed largely over the history of the performing arts. When a person visits the theatre today, they will at the very least expect a seat on which to sit. They may clap at the end of the performance, if it has pleased them, but most theatre-goers would not be so rude as to make noise otherwise, although they may later review the piece poorly in a newspaper column.

Such conventions have not always been the case. It has not always been conventional for the theatre-goer to sit, for example, nor have audiences always been polite and quiet. In some historical cases, the audience would not even attend the theatre for the theatre, but rather to immerse themselves in the theatre of the audience. The viewing of the crowd and the status of being seen within in.

It has never been conventional for a member of the audience to hide from the theatre company. Beatrice was aware of this as she lingered at the right balcony, only half visible behind the arched column of the box. She has taken off her hat and the hatpin and discarded them to a seat while she stays a while to watch her least favourite theatre troupe.

“No, you buffoons!” There is a particularly odorous and unpleasant man directing the troupe. He is sat in the front row of the theatre, his legs angled wide as his ankle, with its large staring eye and dark ink, rests upon one knee. The other knee is bobbing at a loose rhythm while the man leans far back in his seat, one arm slung over the back of the chair. His cravat is askew and looks unwashed, which is particularly troubling if the wearer insists on also using it as a handkerchief and tissue. “This ensemble,” he continues, the word spewed in a heave of French, “is as offensive to the eye as poor people and charity workers. And where is the leading lady?”

He bolts from his chair and begins a stride towards the stage, hopping up the foremost steps towards it until he stands in the centre. He loops a few circles and briefly leaves the stage, only for the lead actress to enter at the other side.

“I believe someone was looking for the star of the show.”

And then the man is back right around, reentering from the left where he exited and spreading his arms wide.

“Ah, the beautiful Ms. Esmé.” He approaches her with a glint in his eyes. “I am afraid you cannot be the star of the show – of course that’s me – but the show wouldn’t be the same without you, my lovely lady.” He turns on his troupe rather suddenly and viciously. “No applause? For my protegee and her exceptionally talented director, mentor, and-”

“Co-star,” Esmé informs him, leaning close and smiling beguilingly. His face has dropped but she seems to ignore it and he returns to a smirk when she too turns on the troupe and snaps, “I believe we were waiting for the applause, walk-ons.”

There is a hurried scattering of clapping and general good will (“You’re very good!”) from the uneasy cast. Beatrice wants to laugh but feels she shouldn’t find this funny. She hides her mouth behind the back of her hand for a moment as if she has suddenly taken ill or coughed up something that one would not like to cough up.

Truth be told, there is no reason for her to be here. It is of course frustrating, when one is a serious actor, that such a ridiculous troupe are attempting to stage a rival play. Beatrice doesn’t believe anything will come of it and is certainly not worried about the quality of the performance. And yet she is hidden in the balcony, wasting time that she would usually invest into her lines.

The applause stops eventually. But it heightens beforehand, as Olaf loops his skinny arm around the waist of Esmé, leans her back with the swoop of an eagle, and kisses her.

“I can think of no better woman to charm an audience into parting with their money,” he purrs. She is smiling in a strangely passive, dazzled way, as if she, like Beatrice, would like to laugh too.

“There isn’t one,” she agrees. “Now stand me up.”

Esmé smooths the contours of her dress when they are back upright and checks the placement of her hair with a few intuitive swipes of her fingers. She sidles on stage while Olaf whips around to bark at the troupe. When Beatrice makes the first move to leave, she realises that Esmé has seen her, for she looks into the box with a moment of black passiveness that is quickly relieved by a small, curled smirk.

* * *

“You know,” Esmé says, resting her forearms on the back of the chair before her, “I wouldn’t be so thrilled with getting lead-roles if it were my boyfriend writing the scripts.”

Beatrice is sat on the edge of the stage with a leg dangling over the side. She is leafing through said script, turning the pages slowly and delicately as if she might smudge the long-dried ink, crease a page, or somehow ruin it.

“It’s an adaption,” she corrects her, not removing her eyes from her lines. “But I take it that you’re sulking.” She smiles lowly to herself.

“As a matter of fact, no.” Esmé stands in the aisle and sidles her hips through the gap of seats, for the rows here are cramped and placed closely together. She walks purposefully to the stage and stands before it, resting an elbow the surface. “I don’t care for the way that Snicket writes. You may be the lead, but I find that his stories are really all, inevitably, about himself.”

“And if you were a writer your stories wouldn’t all be about yourself?” Beatrice scoffs. Her smile quietens when she feels Esmé’s hand on her foot, brazenly grazing the skin of her ankle and sidling very slightly up her calf.

Esmé takes her surprise to grab the script. She wanders away from the stage with a smirk and flicks through the pages, though her own script is languishing behind a seat somewhere.

“Well I never! Author’s notes! He didn’t leave any in mine.”

“Look -  give that here.” Beatrice has bundled herself upright and clambered down from the stage. She stalks Esmé with huffy determination across the narrow parting between stage and audience.

“’With passion, dearest,’” Esmé quotes from a scrawled red note. The curve of her tongue towards her upper teeth is the only thing holding back her laughter. When she glances behind her to see Beatrice tracking her, she hurries her pace a little, skimming the pages faster.

“Esmé!” Beatrice is unusually indignant. She nips round the front and feels close to whining when Esmé turns her back to her. In a moment of foul play, she grabs the edges of what is currently Esmé’s favourite jumper, knowing that stretching the tight stitch of the fabric will drive her insane.

“Oh, just have it! And get your grubby hands off of me.” She turns and tosses the script away from her, as if negotiating herself away from a criminal with a gun. It lands crumpled on the floor and Beatrice retrieves it, smoothing it out and taking it back. “I’m not so interested in your maudlin romance as to fight with you over a hackneyed script.”

It would be loyal to defend the writer and his writing. Beatrice likes Snicket’s writing. She likes his dryness that consumes the warmth of his passions. She respects his tenderness, his earnest manners, and finds, sometimes surprisingly, that his self-deprecating attitude is respectable, for it only covers his firmly held values and is underpinned by a wit as sharp and as bitter as wormwood tea.

“Why do you say the romance is maudlin?”

“As I said,” Esmé says, walking to the front row and crouching, finding her own ruinous script behind a seat. “His stories are about himself. You know they say you learn more about the artist than the subject when looking at a painting.”

Beatrice has hoisted herself back on the stage. She crosses her ankles and places her script in her lap and feels she ought to take better care of it.

“I believe I’ve seen your paintings,” Beatrice muses, although that was a long time ago by now. She isn’t sure if Esmé still owns canvases or sketchbooks but hopes she does. “It must apply to you too.”  

Esmé hums. She leaves the script on the seat and Beatrice wonders why she bothered to find it in the first place.

“Absolutely – and you. People who choose each other deserve each other.”

“You’re criticising me?” Beatrice laughs. She watches Esmé walk towards her and places a hand on her script. Her instinct is to push herself further back on the stage, but that’s so cowardly, and stupid too, that she remains still.

She stifles saying another word when Esmé places her hands on the stage, her fingers arched. The urge to move is stronger and trembling. Beatrice raises her head slowly and looks down on the other.

“Did I not say you deserve each other?” Esmé takes a step closer, drawing her hands closer, sweeping them loosely over the stage, reducing the line of her shoulders but placing her right before Beatrice. “What would you rather I say?”

“I’d rather you took about three steps backwards.”

“Scared, are we? I thought you were afraid of nothing.”

She will do as asked, once she has pushed just a little further. She tilts her head, eyes unmoving. Her nails press absently to the wood of the stage. Beatrice is looking back and she smiles quite slowly, suddenly leaning closer.

“What you said,” she begins slyly, feeling the traitorous thrill of her body in the thrumming of her pulse. “What does that say about you?”

Beatrice no longer feels the itch to move when Esmé briefly loses her smile. But she only shrugs her a shoulder in the end, recovering a dim smile.

“Darling,” Esmé says with an exasperated breath of laughter, “what do you think this,” she gestures vaguely between them, for there is never any real evidence to collect, nothing tangible nor treacherous, “says about you?” She leans a little closer and she is not smiling. “Wicked girl.”

“I don’t mean to be.”

Beatrice moves herself away. She stands with her script, clambering awkwardly to reach her feet and brushing dust from her clothes.

“And yet you are.” Esmé watches her from the ground. She pauses a moment, her eyes holding a certain fire and pathos, but ultimately relinquishes whatever she had considered saying to return to the seats.

They hear the drum of feet soon after. The boys come through with paper bags, some stained with grease. They do not pay much notice to Esmé slouched on a chair by the front, arms crossed, nor do they really notice Beatrice, who walks small, slow routes on stage with her script.

“Hello!” Beatrice says, setting down her papers to go and greet them. Her cheeks are slightly pink, though the theatre is often very warm and stuffy. She murmurs a thanks for lunch and takes a bag, receiving a chaste kiss from her boyfriend. They smile to each other only to be startled by a call from the front:

“The script is driving me insane!” Esmé’s voice rumbles through her words. “And realist set design has been out for months! Would it kill you, Snicket, to be the least bit innovative!?”

**Author's Note:**

> Interconnected drabbles about Beatrice and Esmé and their tragic attraction (actragtion)? Share Esbea vibes on tumblr @tagliatelle--grande


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